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Enter the Death Knight

We finally have solid details on World of Warcraft's first Hero Class: the Death Knight.

With the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, World of Warcraft will introduce its first Hero Class, the Death Knight. Death Knights have been part of Warcraft lore since the real-time strategy game days, serving as powerful mounted necromancers who could command the armies of the Undead or engage in hand-to-hand combat behind the strength of their powerful vampiric runeblades. While the lore and reasoning behind playable Death Knights are still being finalized, we do know that Death Knight players are former servants of the Lich King who have broken away from the Scourge in order to join ranks with the Alliance or the Horde.

All players with a level 55 character will be able to create one Death Knight per realm, per account. There was no mention of the rumored character sacrifice or of a lengthy quest chain to unlock this character slot, so it should be as simple as that. You'll also be able to create a Death Knight belonging to any of the game's playable races. We expect pink-haired gnomish Death Knights with pigtails to be a particularly popular option.

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A freshly minted Death Knight begins at level 55, and is presented with a series of quests that provide a back story, as well as initiating the player to the game mechanics behind the class. Blizzard's designers decided to start the class with a full complement of abilities right off the bat, figuring that any player that has advanced a character to level 55 would be able to learn to handle the new class with minimal difficulty. Getting around as a Death Knight will also be facilitated by their skeletal Deathcharger mount, summoned in a manner similar to a Paladin's charger.

Death Knights are a plate-wearing class that are envisioned as either a tank or a melee-based damage-dealing class. Their resource mechanic is the rune system, a significant departure from the familiar triumvirate of mana, rage and energy. A Death Knight's runes are slotted into their "blade," which lies underneath their health bar as a visual indicator of what resources are available to the player at any given moment. There are six slots in the blade, and the player is free to fill those slots with any given number of Blood, Unholy or Frost runes, these runes being the sources of a Death Knight's power. Spent runes automatically refresh after a set period of time, much like a Rogue's energy bar.

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The three rune types serve as ways to define the role that Death Knights will carve out for themselves. Much like Paladin auras or Warrior stances, a Death Knight will be able to choose a Presence to activate. Presences are self-buffs with powerful effects, and you'll have a Presence suitable for tanking, one for damage-dealing, and presumably one that will be useful for pwning noobs.

A secondary resource called Runic Power is generated by using your rune abilities. Much like how a Warrior builds Rage the more they hit something, Runic Power will increase over the course of a fight; also like Rage, it will decay over time if not spent. In a fashion similar to the Execute ability, Death Knights will have a number of abilities that cost all available Runic Power, with varying levels of effectiveness based on total Runic Power spent. We anticipate that these will work like Rogue finishers, either to finish off an opponent or to provide a significant damage boost to keep the damage pouring out.